Off-highway machines are in widespread use in construction, mining, forestry, and other similar industries. Such machines can be used to transport material, such as, for example, ore, overburden, rock, sand, dirt, or gravel, from one location to another. In a typical loading cycle at a worksite, a hauling machine receives material in its dump body at one location via a loading machine. The hauling machine can be situated with respect to the loading machine (in a process typically referred to as “spotting”) using a variety of techniques, such as by manually sighting the hauling machine under a raised bucket of the loading machine or by using an automated positioning technique, for example. Once loaded, the hauling machine departs from the loading machine to haul the material in its body along a haul road to a second location at the worksite, and then dumps the material at the second location. In the meantime, a second hauling machine takes its place and receives therein more material from the loading machine. At a given location at a worksite, a number of different machines can repeatedly perform this loading cycle in a serial fashion.
The conditions in which these machines are used can be severe. The worksite's haul roads may have ruts, potholes, large rocks, or other obstacles or hazards scattered about their paths. Because these machines typically haul very heavy loads, load imbalances can contribute to fatigue failure by causing twisting actions of the machine's frame and other structural components as it travels from one location to another at the worksite. When a machine with an unbalanced load encounters an obstacle (such as a bump or pothole, e.g.) along a haul road, the frame of the machine can be subjected to even more twisting and other structurally-damaging forces that can cause the structural components of the machine to fail prematurely. Load imbalances can cause further damage during dumping of the material.
As hauling conditions of a worksite become more and more severe, the expected life of the structural components of the machine decreases. It would be very helpful for worksite management to be informed when a machine is being used at the worksite such that its expected life is being reduced.
Knowledge of potentially damaging worksite conditions would be useful to not only worksite managers, but also machine operators. For example, the driver of a hauling machine could decrease the speed of the hauling machine when alerted to an unbalanced loading condition until the load can be dumped from the machine or the unbalanced loading condition is otherwise resolved. Furthermore, if an operator of a loading machine used to load material in the hauling machine is notified that he is loading the hauling machine in an unbalanced manner, then he can strive to improve the balanced placement of subsequent loads.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,887,454 is entitled, “Method for Monitoring a Work Vehicle Suspension” and is directed to a system and method monitoring the struts of a machine's suspension system. The struts contribute to the proper operation of the vehicle such that a single collapsed strut can have serious manifestations in structural damage, tire wear, and payload monitor accuracy. These consequences can be mitigated by an accurate and reliable strut monitor. According to the '454 patent, pressure type sensors are disposed on each of the struts and their pressure is monitored during three critical phases of operation. These phases include static, loading, and roading modes and each mode requires a distinct method for detecting a collapsing strut. The presence of a collapsing strut, detected by any of the three methods, is communicated to the vehicle operator whereby operation can be immediately suspended. Although the strut monitoring system of the '454 patent is effective in monitoring for strut failure, there is a continued need in the art to provide additional solutions to enhance the ability to monitor loading conditions of a machine to help reduce the occurrence of machine damage caused by unbalanced loading conditions at the worksite and to help identify locations at the worksite that can be improved to help mitigate unbalanced loading conditions.
It will be appreciated that this background description has been created by the inventors to aid the reader, and is not to be taken as an indication that any of the indicated problems were themselves appreciated in the art. While the described principles can, in some aspects and embodiments, alleviate the problems inherent in other systems, it will be appreciated that the scope of the protected innovation is defined by the attached claims, and not by the ability of any disclosed feature to solve any specific problem noted herein.